Ignorance is Not Bliss

I am going to do something radical—tell you stop reading this (please come back) to turn to something other than Syncopated Politics.  Instead, I recommend you look at an essay by Keith Gessen in the London Review of Books entitled “Why Not Kill Them All?”  

Gessen writes about Ukraine, about the good guys and the bad guys, about Putin, about the Ukrainian fascists, the nationalists, the separatists, about the Maidan protests in Kiev, about the illegal coal mines set up by Aleksandr Yanukovych (son of the deposed former President) that pockmark the countryside with open pits and corpses, of people’s governors and oligarchs, and mobs, and thugs, and massed tanks, and on and on.

Gessen reminds one of what a good journalist can do, but he also confounds my efforts to keep everything straight in my head.  Who are the good guys here? We know Putin is an ogre, but there are also ethnic Russians, who, surprise, want to be Russians. Is that wrong? There are nationalists who want to keep the country together, and nationalists who are scary fascists with a taste for using their fists.  None of these folk are choirboys.  All seem to know how to march, know how to throw the odd Molotov cocktail, and all seem to have the same willingness, if not the propensity, to use violence.   

The most pervasive sense you get in reading the essay is chaos and an ad hoc response to every situation.  Government representatives visited Donetsk, a major urban and industrial center, met with civic leaders, but spent most of their time trying to convince hard-liner football (soccer) fans to take up arms and ready themselves to fight the pro-Russian forces in the city. Soccer fans! You might call this the Ukrainian Hooligan Resistance.  There are beatings, kidnappings, and “enhanced interrogations.” There is class conflict; the middle class seems to line up the more nationalistic sensibilities, the working class seems to go with more of a schismatic, pro-Russian, but paradoxically anti-oligarch movement.  Yet the biggest of the oligarchs, Rinat Akhmetov, was secretly financing the separatists.     

I sent the link to Gessen’s essay to three very smart friends, and I think they felt as I did. It is a kaleidoscope of information that is very hard to integrate, as if you have been dropped into an ancient city with only an outdated map in an unknown language written in an incomprehensible script.  You aren’t just uneducated—you are un-educable.

What should we be doing in Ukraine?  Good question. Clearly, there’s no consensus here for anything besides blaming Obama for not taking on the Russian Bear.  But, even if you buy in to the GOP trope, which, essentially involves the unsupported statement that a more assertive President would have kept Ukraine together and dissuaded the Russians from moving troops across the borders, how do you deal with what amounts to an internal civil war? 

Here’s what John McCain had to say to The Guardian in December of 2013: “These people love the United States of America, they love freedom – and I don't think you could view this as anything other than our traditional support for people who want free and democratic society.”

A ringing peroration, but which people was he talking about?  When you read Gessen’s essay, is there any group, any group at all, that fits that description—lovers of the United States, and lovers of liberty?

Here’s what Gessen said about the thinking of the people that McCain presumably would embrace as allies:  “This is what I heard from respectable people in Kiev. Not from the nationalists, but from liberals, from professionals and journalists. All the bad people were in one place – why not kill them all?”

“Kill them all” doesn't quite seem to fit our vision.  I am not blaming McCain, per se.  He’s just one of the many flapping mouths, from politicians to opinion writers, who are falling into the same trap, whether it’s Ukraine, or ISIS, or Syria.  They all seek the simplest of answers to the most complex of issues.

Part of the problem is pure politics.  There’s an election coming up (there’s always an election coming up) and grabbing a microphone and spouting out certitudes looks good for the base.  We used to have more cooperation between the parties on issues of national security, but it would be a sanitized version of history if we were to ever say that politics stops at the water’s edge.  It never has, and it never will.

Sheer ignorance plays a role, an ignorance that is grounded in outmoded certitudes.  The people who make policy in this country are too often living in the past.  They are still 20^th Century Euro-centrists.  Think the World Wars, when the nasty old Germans, as a country, would periodically erupt from behind their borders in wars of conquest.  First, the invasion of the Low Countries and surrounding lesser powers.  Then the French display appalling ineptness (with appropriate Gallic pride, of course.)  Somewhere in there, the Italians switch sides a couple of tines. The Brits hang on, manfully; solid bulldog chins making it through with characteristic grit.  Then our boys come over to liberate the continent, the bad countries surrender, and it’s all over with.  The mean Germans are shown the blessings of democracy, and all of us cultured Westerners get to take on the Ruskies and Godless Communism.  It’s beautifully linear; each country aligned for, and against, other countries, and it’s always possible to tell who is wearing the white and black hats. 

Of course, we know this is deficient in a time where crazies are everywhere, where countries (like Ukraine, and Iraq, and Syria) are riven with tribalism, and where smashing a country just doesn’t have the positive impact it used to. And, in our heart of hearts, we know that pure force will be deficient as well.  Beating up people who have been driven by hatreds for centuries doesn't suddenly make them permanently passive.

But the most important deficiency in the way we make foreign/military policy isn't politics or even ignorance.  It’s cowardice.  Not the cowardice of insufficient force.  The cowardice of an easy conscience and an insufficient imagination.  No one says this is easy.  Try reading Gessen several times, as I did, and then pick a pure side, if you can.  Or try figuring out a way to surgically separate friend and foe in the Middle East.  You won't be able to. 

But, that’s not our job as laypeople.  We aren't the President, we aren't Congressmen and Senators charged with making the right choices.  And they can’t even bother to debate it.  The House just put off discussion of an authorizing resolution to act on ISIS until October—October to talk about what some people describe as an existential threat. 

My hunch is that there are a lot of people in Washington, who, when outside the cameras and the lights and friendly media outlets, know they don’t really know all that much.  And they fear that, fear being challenged, fear being exposed in their ignorance.  That’s why we haven’t had the hearings and policy debates at the Congressional level. 

But not knowing something is no shame—it's a curable condition, with effort. It is refusing to learn, refusing to discuss, that is a disgrace. 

We are better than that, and we ought to start showing it. 

September 15, 2014

Michael Liss (Moderate Moderator)

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Why the Heck II

Why The Heck II

After last week’s post a friend asked me a very pertinent question.  He said he understood my thinking in voting for Barack Obama in 2008, but found it difficult to fathom how I could possibly reject Romney in 2012.  Romney, in his mind, was a terrific leader, an excellent Governor of Massachusetts, a man of the world, of deep experience, and a superb manager. 

Romney would have been a great President, my friend insisted.  Why the heck hadn’t I voted for Romney?

Issues, I said.  Issues mattered to me.  I wasn’t what many on the Right contemptuously call an Obamabot.  I was aware of Obama’s flaws.  But I watched the Republican primary debates very closely, I saw Mitt move sharply right, and I found the gap between what I believed and what he was saying grow to a chasm.  Mitt Romney had tried so hard to convince the GOP base that he was one of them, that he convinced me of the same.

To be fair, I didn’t have any illusions that Mitt was the passionate and committed “severe conservative” he claimed to be.  But by failing to be his own man, he made me evaluate him on the terms his party defined for him.  Those were terms I (and apparently the majority) couldn’t go with.

My friend insisted that Mitt would never have governed that way.  But I don’t think we should be guessing what politicians really mean when they are whispering to their campaign competitors, or shouting to their base.  We should take them at their word.  And we should evaluate whether we want to be led by them in the direction they indicate.  

Now is the time to make those evaluations—now and over the next two years, as we pick a new government.  We are about to have midterm elections in which every poll and every prognosticator predict Republican gains and possibly a huge Republican wave. 

Forget about being “Ready for Hillary.”  Are we ready for the Republicans? How should the voters react to potential GOP dominance? Is it what we want?

Obviously, if you are a Republican, you can head to the polls and measure the drapes.  But if you are a moderate wondering who to vote for, or a disheartened Democrat wondering whether to vote at all, I would ask you to picture a Republican future, and ask yourself if that’s the type of political world you want to live in.  What do Republicans do when they are in charge?  

The best way to gauge that is to see what they have done.

Priority one tends to be voting rights. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 22 states have enacted new restrictions on voting to be in effect for the 2014-midterm elections.  These vary, but include more stringent voter identification laws, reduced or eliminated early voting, changes to absentee voting, restrictions on registration drives, and fewer hours for polling places. The primary purpose of these, even the GOP admits, is directed at reducing Democratic turnout, particularly among minorities and younger voters.  Think of it as securing the borders against unwanted choices by the electorate.

Also a target are working people. The GOP loves the working person, so long they don’t have the temerity to organize, or ask for higher wages, or equal pay for women, or better health and safety regulations. In 2013 alone, 21 states introduced right-to-work legislation.  At the Supreme Court, a conservative majority legitimized discriminatory conduct based on religious belief, and curtailed the rights of public service unions to collect dues.  

The environment?  I want to table the entire question of climate change, since there is absolutely no way you are ever going to convince the overwhelming majority of Republican voters that such a thing exists.  So, for the purposes of argument, let’s stipulate it's a gigantic fraud.  How about the rest of the environment—water, air, land preservation?  I don’t think anyone can make a serious case that the GOP supports any substantive regulations, and particularly not those that involve the extraction industries.  Who co-wrote the GOP platform on the environment?  Congressman Ed Whitfield of Kentucky, Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s energy and power subcommittee, and a major supporter of coal, gas, nuclear, and “reducing the regulatory burden.”   Want to see the GOP in action on the topic?  Visit North Carolina, where, earlier this year, an accident at a waste pond caused nearly 27 million gallons of contaminated water and much as 82,000 tons (that’s “tons”) of coal ash spilled into North Carolina’s Dan River.  What happened to good old Duke?  To start with, they were well protected—from liability.  Before the incident occurred, state regulators, as directed by newly elected Governor Pat McCrory (a Duke employee for 28 years) blocked lawsuits against Duke for existing hazardous sites, eventually shielding 31 waste ponds from litigation and absolving Duke of responsibility for cleaning up it’s own mess.  Then, after the accident, it rushed to declare the water safe to drink despite having detected substantially elevated arsenic levels.  

Maybe the environment isn’t important to you.  How about personal privacy, and reproductive rights? Just since the start of 2014, 13 states have enacted new regulations restricting abortion, and most of these aren’t little “tweaks” but rather omnibus actions with the clear intent of closing any and all abortion providers in their states.  I understand the pro-life arguments and respect those who oppose abortions. But, if you are a voter with anything less that an “A” rating from the evangelical right and don’t want this view imposed on you, you should strongly consider that the GOP expects to nationalize what they have accomplished at the state level.

And guns, an issue that people get more passionate about than pregnancy?  The GOP and the NRA stand together as one.  Guns for good guys and good gals, pretty much everywhere, in every place, and at every time, and for anyone who can get a permit. Maybe you are like me, don't oppose reasonable gun ownership, and don’t care what people do in other states.  If Texans want to play cowboy, and you live in New York, let them play cowboy in Texas.  But, that’s not enough for the GOP.  They support what amounts to universal reciprocity on carry.  If a Texan can get a license, regardless of his background, his health, even his emotional stability, it must be honored in every state that permits carry.  That’s just about everywhere. You need not meet New York’s standards for obtaining a permit. When Ted Cruz rolls his tank into Manhattan and flashes his Lone Star permit, Texas rules. That’s to be national policy, written into the GOP Platform.  At the state level, Georgia passed a bill of such (breath-taking) breadth that I think I’d want to buy a gun as a precaution before I went there.  In Georgia, not only can virtually everyone get a gun, but they can use it: you can claim “stand your ground” even if the firearm you are standing with isn’t legal.

These five are an “O-fer” for me, and I can offer a dozen more.  You might agree with me on some or all, but still decide that utility is more important that principle, and just vote for the guy you think will make the trains run on time.  That’s the beauty of living in a democracy.  We don’t have to justify our choices. We just have to make them, and then live with the consequences.   

My friend told me today he was going to convert me.  He’s very smart, and very persuasive. But, he has got some “issues” to work on. 

September 10, 2014

Michael Liss (Moderate Moderator)

Please join us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SyncPol

Choices: What the Uzi Teaches

Choices: What the Uzi Teaches

Why the heck did I vote for Barack Obama?  Twice?

Several weeks ago I received set of persistent and pointed emails from one reader who was asking me to justify my votes for President Obama in 2008 and 2012.  He was polite, and I tried several responses, but the writer was having none of it, and finally, with no minds changed, we managed a ceasefire.

But that didn’t stop me from thinking about it.  Why the heck did I vote for Barack Obama?

Mr. O has not had the best time of it, to say the least. I realize that in six years, my support has changed from aspirational to defensive.  I knew, going in to the 2008 election, that Obama didn’t have the depth of experience I wanted in a President.  I thought (and still think) he had both the talent and intelligence.  I hoped he would change the fetid atmosphere in Washington, dominated by small-minded Roveian tactics enforcing the sourness of Cheney/Bush’s ever-expanding Unitary Executive. 

He didn’t, for reasons that are going to be explored by historians and pop psychologists for decades. He has had a lot of help. If there ever was a definition of a bipartisan failure, the last five-plus years have been it. Rarely have so many politicians and elected officials done so much to discredit themselves, their ideologies, and their parties.

So, with the “hopey/changey” stuff off the table and the sewer filling up, I found myself in a defensive crouch.  For a fairly long time, most of that was directly related to the overwhelming sense that Obama got a raw deal.  The Republicans just wouldn’t play with the new kid on the block.  But, even that didn’t suffice.  At the end of the day, we were learning two things.  The GOP might be the nasties in the neighborhood, but Mr. Obama showed minimal adaptability and growth.  To quote the beloved Donald Rumsfeld in a different context, “you go to war with the army you have---not the army you might want.”  What Republicans were demonstrating is that they would only join an army they were in charge of.  What Obama was demonstrating was that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make the effort to change their minds.

“With or against us” is a stark, binary choice.  Go with an Administration and a person you agree more with on policy, but who hasn’t risen to the challenge, or dance with the authoritarian motorcycle gang who broke down the doors to ride into the ball?

Which leads me to the Uzi.  By now, the story is so well known that I am relieved to not have to repeat it. There are a couple of things that appear to be clear: a) it was a complete, tragic, accident, and b) no laws were broken.  Sadly, but inevitably, it’s turned into another one of the endless debates on the Second Amendment.  In fact, it has virtually nothing to do with the Second Amendment.  What it has to do with is choices—both how we as a group, through our elected officials, make them, and, far more intimately, the judgment we show in governing ourselves.

No law is a substitute for common sense.  A law might have stopped this particular shooting range from offering that Uzi to that traumatized nine year old, and because of that, one wishes there had been one in place. But Arizona is a gun-friendly state that didn’t have one—and no law could have prevented all nine-year olds from ever being handed an Uzi to shoot.  To preclude that, you need thinking, prudent adults that are supervising the children to all decide that an Uzi is just too dangerous to play with.

In short, the question the Uzi poses is the essence of how we think about government, or more accurately, how we should think about government.  We can’t be purely top down rule-makers for every possible situation; it is both impractical and a betrayal of the ideals on which we were founded.  What should be obvious to all is that while you can regulate and even ban behavior, nothing can completely prevent deliberate lawlessness, foolishness, or just bad luck.  That principle applies whether we are talking about Uzis, or drinking, or social issues like reproductive rights or gays, or a host of other concerns.  And it applies at every level of government.  Integrity, respect for the Constitution, respect for the rights of others, and good judgment are what we ought to be looking for, not an expansion of Justinian’s Code.

That does not mean that government should abstain from deciding where public safety is concerned and the risks to others are great.  That is why you can’t drive at 110 MPH in a 50 MPH zone.  Or (hopefully) why you shouldn’t be permitted to dump your hazardous substance collection into the nearest well.  But it does mean that the hand of government should be used with restraint.  We cannot always protect people from themselves, and we have no right to insist, upon pain of the law, that they live the personal, moral, and religious life we would choose. A democracy cannot function when it prioritizes the creation of inmates and penitents. 

And that’s the rub. Because, when you scratch the surface of both the Democratic and Republican parties, neither trusts the people.  Neither ever means, “we don’t need no more laws.” What they really mean is “we don't need no more laws that we don’t agree with.” And that leaves the moderate voter, the non-single issue voter, whether he is center, center left, or center right, with a conundrum. When you go into the voting booth in a system that seems to be growing increasingly polarized and Parliamentary, you are not only picking alleged competence, but also a political and personal lifestyle.  

We shouldn’t have to.  That, oddly enough, is what we should all be getting out of the Uzi.  Arizona didn’t have a law because it didn’t want one.  Arizonans have recoiled in horror, they will mourn, but the culture isn’t going to change, and those of us who might disagree have no business insisting on it. We can do what we want in our own home states. 

So, to my correspondent of a few weeks ago, who pressed me on why I supported Mr. Obama, here’s my reasoning:  I am not willing to trade the personal liberty rights I value in return for an inchoate promise of greater competence and security.  But show me a candidate who has demonstrated thoughtfulness, and is willing to trust and respect my judgment enough to put aside the base’s desire to create a ideological utopia, and I am more than willing to listen. 

That’s my final answer. 

September 3, 2014

Michael Liss (Moderate Moderator)

Please join us on Twitter @SyncPol

The Horrible and the Miserable

The Horrible and the Miserable

There is a dusty box somewhere, perhaps in my storage room, or perhaps, somehow, thankfully, “inadvertently” discarded, and in it is a copy of my Junior High School yearbook, circa the Nixon Administration.  Along with the usual clichés and gruesome pictures likely to send my kids into paroxysms of laughter is a “Most Likely To Become…” page.

I was not voted most likely to be a CEO, or a corporate tycoon, or a doctor, or a car mechanic.  Nor a rock star or a movie idol or quarterback.  I didn’t even get something cerebral-but-drab like accountant or actuary.  Instead I was picked most likely to become a politician.  I wouldn’t have remembered this at all if it weren’t for the little caricatures that went with each job.  Cool ones for the cool guys with guitars, and actors with Dudley Do-Right smiles, and athletes in helmets.  As for the politician, there was a gnome-like man, balding, a bit overweight, in a rumpled suit, with his mouth open and his finger pointed towards the sky, ready to speechify.

I’m not sure this was considered praise, nor why I was selected for this particular “honor” but nevertheless, there I was, future politician.  The bad news is that the caricature turned out to be remarkable prescient (except for chubby part.) 

The truth was that I was a politics and history junkie even then.  I thought the two best jobs in the world would either to be a doctor like Joseph Bell (Conan Doyle’s model for Sherlock Holmes) or a Senator.  Either the acutely observant, or the acutely loquacious. 

History tends to be defined by great men and women, but American history is not just the story of the four up on Mount Rushmore, it’s something really quite unique.  In less than 250 years, we freed ourselves from a great empire, conquered a continent, won two World Wars, built an economic and industrial powerhouse with an expanding middle class, became the indispensible country, and did it all while working with a real democracy from the very onset.  This last part is what makes us different.  Other nations have risen to great power guided by monarchies, aristocracies, or dictatorships—central organizing forces.  We did it while being wholly self-governed, through a combination of individually directed and collective efforts.

There is a peculiar genius in this.  In effect, we created a gyroscope of competing economic and political interests that often tilts in one direction or another, but keeps spinning.  We make a great many mistakes; some acts of omission, some deliberate, more than a few of which brought us no honor.  We have wasted stupendous amounts of treasure and lives.  We have an unnerving propensity for occasional violence.  In a very short period of time, with limited effort, I could list 50 things we completely screwed up.

And yet, like the gyroscope, we keep spinning and moving, and accomplishing, all the while moaning and groaning about how hard our lives are, how horrible the rest of the world is to us, and how miserable our kids future will be.  Of course, there’s more than just self-pity here—we need to blame people for the awfulness of our day-to-day existence.  And there’s always someone out there who’s fault it is.  The guy who is richer than us, or the one who is poorer.  The moral scolds who want to tell us what to do or the libertine dopers.  The gun-lovers or the gun-haters.  The “program for every problem” and the “government is the only problem” crowds.  The list, and the opprobrium, is endless

And still, we keep moving, often with that great creativity that flourishes best in an atmosphere of political and economic freedom when matched with comparative stability.  But we aren’t a perfect machine, and there are times when our problems seem almost insuperable and our leadership inadequate to meet the challenge.   There is a terrific, understated moment in “Children of a Lesser God” where the hearing and speaking Leeds (William Hurt in the film) is so emotionally overloaded by the tension of communicating in sign language with Sarah (Marlee Matlan), his deaf lover, that he literally has to turn the noise off—by flinging himself down on the couch and turning on (quite loud) classical music. 

That’s very much where were are right now.  Too much noise.  The world is filled with invasions, lunatic murderers, virulent diseases, and intractable poverty.  And our leadership seems, well, just awful, from Mr. Obama’s apparent isolation and passivity, to the opportunistic and self-aggrandizing behavior of his opponents.  Our peculiar genius seems, at this moment, more attuned to pointing fingers and barking at each other. 

Every week, we seem to have a new challenge, and a new demonstration of our incapacity to govern well.  Today, the crisis in the Middle East and the rise of ISIL dominated the Sunday talk shows.  Each featured one Republican after another denouncing the enemy—Obama. They all want more manly muscularity—each one reads from the playbook, spouting off platitudes as if they were self-evident truths. Paul Ryan says “Obama must act decisively” and Kelly Ayotte says containing ISIL “won’t cut it”  and Mike Rogers claims, “ISIL is one plane ticket away from the US,”  Deep thinkers, all. My favorite is Senator’s McCain’s “ISIL could have been prevented.”

Sure, if only an American President had been willing to go to war in the Middle East with massive force, there would be no terrorists.  None.  The entire region would be a happy, peaceful land of freedom-loving capitalists.

We have to break away from this.  We have to acknowledge that the enemy is at the gate, and there’s no time for petty squabbling.  Tom Friedman of the New York Times nails it in this Sunday’s New York Times.  “We’ve got to stop messing around at home as if this moment is just the same-old, same-old — and our real and tacit allies had better wake up, too. Preserving and expanding the world of sustainable order is the leadership challenge of our time.”

Can a democracy, where the constant struggle for power often obscures the greater good, accomplish this?  I still think so.  

Tony Blair, upon the occasion of his last “Question Time” as his ten years as Prime Minister drew to a close, said something remarkable, and oddly antique.  “Some may belittle politics but we know, who are engaged in it that it is where people stand tall. And although I know it has its many harsh contentions it is still the arena that sets the heart beating a little faster. And if it is on occasions the place of low skullduggery it is more often the place for the pursuit of noble causes, and I wish everyone, friend or foe well, and that is that, the end.”

Not so horrible, and not so miserable? Blair might have made a good Senator.  Of course, we split with those chaps a while back.

August 24, 2014

Michael Liss (Moderate Moderator)

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The Barber and the Doorman

The Barber and the Doorman

My father, who, in his time, was known to give a lecture or two, also had a showstopper when you were clearly "wrong" but foolishly tried to reason with him. “You talk too much.  Try listening.”

I have been writing for Syncopated Politics since September of 2011—over 150 items, nearly 200,000 words.  That is the approximate length of two epic novels, or, in the vernacular, an awful lot of talking, epic or not.  After all that, and having received an unusually large number of emails since “The Obama Paradox” including a few who questioned why I voted for Mr. Obama in the first place, I thought that perhaps Dad had a point.  For a week, I decided to try listening.

Barbershops are a wonderful place to start.  Lean me back in the chair, take away my glasses, let me give a couple of instructions (not much will help at this stage) and there is very little I can do beyond open my ears.   Let’s begin with the obvious. Floyd, of Mayberry, had to be a fictional character.  There are no American-born barbers in my neck of the woods.  If your shop is big enough, you are a melting pot.  A soccer-loving Argentine, a South Asian, a Russian woman, and even a Norwegian.  Mine, for the day, was a quiet, older man with a Romanian accent.  And, to my right, a classic of the genre, the Old Italian barber (I wondered if they came pre-made from the factory, having never encountered a young Italian barber.)     

A barber is like a favorite bartender. He knows all your secrets, particularly the ones that are no secret at all.  Since mine wasn’t the verbose type, I settled on the quiet, reassuring tones of the gentleman from Verona.   His customer liked to talk, and he had a big, gravely sound that had a touch of Brooklyn interspersed with an education, both formal and from the street. Gravely-man jumped from topic to topic; the long curly hair of his youth, his kids, work, vacations (a good place for the barber to join in “you’ve been to the Amalfi coast?”) and finally, to politics.

Now, we are talking (actually, now we are listening.)  I wanted to hear what this blowhard had to say.  What follows below is a reasonably close transcription:

“DeBlasio—a complete waste.  What an idiot.  He can’t even show up on time for his own press conferences.  Did (the barber) know only about 70,000 picked this guy in the primary?  That’s no way to choose the Mayor of the greatest city in the world.  He’ll never win a second term.  A bum. Too bad that guy who ran against him wasn’t better.”

Then, on to Obama.  After all the comments had I received recently, I was particularly interested in this one.  “Not good enough.  Came into a mess, but not good enough. Not enough experience.”  He ticked off a few policy points, most of them, in his opinion, mistakes in either concept or execution.  And then, he did something interesting.  He paused for a moment and I thought he would launch into some new round of denunciations, but he didn’t.  “The Republicans…they didn’t help.  They didn’t meet him half way—they didn’t do the right thing.”

At this point, my tonsorial experience was coming to a close, and my chair needed a new (perhaps apolitical) occupant, so I got up, tipped the barber, paid, and left.  But I could still hear the man’s voice in my head, and it rattled around for the rest of the day.  In a few short sentences, he had summed up almost the entire Obama Presidency and, to an extent, politics itself.  And the barber, a born diplomat, smoothly followed his customer’s lead with a few non-committal but oddly reassuring phrases.  Gravel-man had a point, and he made it far better than the usual ranters.

Later that afternoon, I said goodbye to the longest-tenured doorman in our building.  In all the years I’ve lived here, he was mostly a silent sentinel—unfailingly courteous, occasionally showing a glint of humor, but dignified in an old fashioned way.  He didn’t chitchat or banter.  Sometimes you wonder what the inner life of a doorman is like.  It’s not a great job—you are on your feet all day, you have to take angry calls from people who think the radiator is either too hot or too cold, and you have to be discrete and composed even when you would like exercise your vocabulary.  Doormen see everything—the misbehaving kids, the teens (or grownups) who have had one or two too many, the boyfriend being snuck upstairs after school but before the parents are home.  If they are there as long a time as ours was, they see life and death as well, the joy of newborns being brought home from the hospital and the sorrow of personal loss.

It wasn’t until his last day that this private man and I actually had a conversation that went beyond pleasantries. He’d come to America more than four decades ago.  Had a wife, one child and two grandchildren.  Was not only leaving the building, but also the city.  Moving upstate, to a community near where he had had a little summer place.  Bought a new house up there, a new car, now had to sell his place in the city.  No mortgages and no car loans.  In his years as a doorman he had managed to pay everything off and saved enough for the new. I realize there had to be much more to the man, and I’m sure he had his share of difficulties, but he seemed to have done so many things right, and now, health intact, was moving to a quieter and less stressful life.  A life that he and his wife had earned, through hard work, goals, and frugality.  In just a few short sentences, he, too, had summed up a way of living, a success that had seemed more enduring than just the collection of an infinite number of expensive toys. And one that stood as quiet rebuke to anyone ready to stereotype a person because of where he came from or the accent with which he spoke.

New ideas and challenged preconceptions can come from odd places.  There is an opinion piece by E.J. Dionne in Monday’s Washington Post, “Where Goes the Neighborhood” that is worth reading.  Dionne points out that, as we spend less time with our actual neighbors, and more with like-minded groups (usually political) we are effectively engaging in self-limiting behavior.  “It’s easier and less challenging, for example, to engage with those who share our attitudes than to lend an ear to a neighbor who might be skeptical of our views on politics or religion.”   I would go further than that—your neighbor who just spent the entire Saturday with you, dawn to dusk, dragging ice and water and coffee urns and donuts to some school function has just earned some credibility, regardless of whether you agree with his position on the 2nd Amendment.  

And, it’s possible he might even have a point, because the world is nuanced, even if we refuse to be, and reality more complex than we are willing to acknowledge.  Picking a side and closing your mind doesn’t get you there.  Just listen to the blowhard in the next barber chair, or the quiet man who opened up your cab door. All kinds of surprises out there if you are willing to hear them.

Talk less, listen more?  

August 12, 2014

Michael Liss (Moderate Moderator)

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The Obama Paradox

The Obama Paradox-Climbing The Wall of Rejection

I am about to spend most of the next one thousand words criticizing President Obama, all without discussing one iota of policy, but first I wanted to tell a personal story.

About thirty-five years ago, through a very odd series of coincidences and busted plans, I found myself strolling around Manhattan with a beautiful French woman who, until that afternoon, was also a complete stranger.

We had a terrific time. She had this ridiculously charming accent and laugh.  It was a stunner of an early autumn day, and we just wandered aimlessly and took it all in. At one point we stopped and, having bought too much pastry for two people, found a bench in Central Park and gorged ourselves silly. We ended up on Fifth Avenue, and, as the wind had started to pick up a little, I gave her my blazer. 

What happened next is something I’ve never been able to forget.  An older woman, seeing this, looked back and forth between the two of us, shook her head vigorously, and then glared at me.  My companion may have been charming and beautiful and educated, but she was, quite clearly, also of at least part African ancestry.  And my completely harmless gesture of offering my jacket was just too intimate--I had crossed a barrier and broken a taboo.

Before you come to the conclusion that I’m about to tell you that all the opposition to President Obama is race-based, I’m not.  Kennedy faced serious doubts about his Catholicism, Mitt Romney his Mormon faith, and I’m sure the first serious Jewish or Hispanic candidate will also find an undercurrent of rejection from a segment of the population.  JFK and Obama won, and Romney was close, which just underscores that in a culture like ours, those willing to give everyone a fair hearing more than overwhelm the percentage of haters.  

But, what I am saying is that Barack Obama would have had to be a fool not to realize that there were people (including some in his own party) who weren’t going to be able to abide him being President because of who he was.  And when you add the far greater number of people who won't accept him as President because of what party he belongs to, his climb up the wall of public rejection was going to be that much steeper.  

His problems weren’t going to stop with the electorate.  Just five years before, he was only an Illinois State Senator.  He had served one term in the United States Senate, and, on the wings of his extraordinarily golden tongue, had vaulted over every other politician in the country to somehow, almost absurdly, become President of the United States. Washington is not known for its shortage of ego, and the reality of having the baseball equivalent of a high school fast-baller suddenly start and win four games of the World Series caused a lot of heads to do an “Exorcism” spin. John McCain has never gotten over it.

No matter how heady his triumph, he should have known walking in the door that there were a lot of really angry people who would be delighted to see him fall flat on his face. And he should have worked harder--far harder, to build bridges, find allies, schmooze, tamp down fires, soothe, cajole, appoint, and even bribe some of the opposition.  There’s a very good chance that many would have told him to jump in the lake anyway (I’m being discreet in my choice of language) but some of them might have taken him up on the offer.  Sow a little, and maybe, you can reap a little.

Obama had to raise his game, but he missed the signs. Perhaps others would have as well.  Not only had he won a decisive victory, but the Democrats also made major gains in the House and got to 60 in the Senate.  Felt like a mandate, and Pelosi and Reid carried the water for him and insulated him from the realities of Congress. Still, a really farsighted leader, aware of his own unique vulnerabilities, would have not only made friends in his own party, but also seen that a point of maximum Republican weakness was the very time to reach out a hand.  Maybe they would have slapped it aside, but the opportunity was lost.  He forgot the most basic rule of political physics—if you bring your opponent close enough to spit in your face, he’s also close enough to splatter himself.  Helps keep things dry.

Why didn’t he? Part of Mr. Obama’s problem was that he hadn’t had a lot of practice.  Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley, writing about the surprisingly contested governors races in otherwise partisan Kansas and Hawaii, made an observation that might be particularly apt for Mr. Obama’s current difficulties: "To understand the difference between the gubernatorial contests and the Senate races, just remember the basic distinction between the two offices: governors act and achieve while senators talk and vote."

To put it more bluntly, Senators only have to talk about doing things; governors actually have to get them done. Presidents are governors on speed, with everything orders of magnitude more complex, more treacherous, and potentially of existential import. Being a Senator, and even a great candidate, is not necessarily the same skill set.

And, there’s a central fallacy we all indulge in when talking about the President.  He may be “the most powerful person on Earth” but that’s all he is, a person.  He’s not Superman.  He can’t run around making peace in the Middle East and Ukraine, stopping forest fires, easing droughts, turning back a hurricane, and doing it all before breakfast.  He doesn’t get a shiny new “Iron Man” suit with the latest bells and whistles.  Instead, he has to climb into a Rube Goldberg contraption that lurches and burps and stalls and still smells of the last occupant.

A President has to make that contraption work. That means picking good policies, getting them enacted and implemented, and choosing good people to run his departments and telling them what his expectations are.  And it means going down to the boiler room of Congress, and stroking the greasy mechanics in made-to-measure suits who know very well that all it takes is one spanner in the wrong place, and the whole machinery grinds to a halt.  And every one of those esteemed folk carries several in their pocket.

How did Obama do? On policy and appointments, all Presidents have their hits and their misses.  I could tick off consequential failures in every past Administration and countless Cabinet members who were eased (or shoved) out the door.  Obama is no different, and with the passage of time, I think his record in this area will be judged as mixed.

But, on the central issue of Presidential leadership, the ability to get as many people as possible to work to make the machine move, I think he has failed.  And it’s not just because of the nasty lady who threw me the dirty look 35 years ago, or her spiritual descendants.  She’s not irrelevant, but she’s not decisive.  It was his job to figure that out, find people he could work with, and act.  

How does a man twice get elected, and yet end up perpetual trench warfare?  When he’s paradoxically great with crowds, but not so great with people. 

I voted for Mr. Obama twice, and I don't regret my choice.  But at the end of the day, whatever the obstacles, the buck stops at his door.  He has to do better.  Not just for me, but for all of us.

August 3, 2014

Michael Liss (Moderate Moderator)

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Ready To Govern?

Ready To Govern?

There is an interesting article by Peter Schroeder and Cristina Marcos in The Hill “The GOP Wants to Show it Can Govern” which might seem somewhat like a parody, but is deadly serious.  With less than 100 days to go before the midterms, elections that virtually every analyst is sure will result in substantial gains, the GOP (now) feels the need to show it can govern.

Why?  Well, we know that Barack Obama can’t govern (that’s a topic for another day) but even if the GOP takes the Senate, there’s still the Constitutionally messy fact that he remains in the White House through the end of 2016.  And, while impeachment is a favorite word among the faithful (a recent poll showed that 57% of Republicans think that Obama should be impeached and removed from office) there is also the other Constitutionally messy fact-- good old Joe Biden is still vice-president.   Biden may be mocked, but they have nothing on him.  Removing Mr. Obama might be a bracing hot towel to the face before a good Republican shave.  Removing Biden would be a coup d’état, and the country would know it.  Imagine the knife-fight for Speaker. Probably not the best thing for the Republican brand.

So, why the concern about governing, especially when not governing is working out so well for them?  It’s a real risk to go on record as doing something.  If you actually pass legislation, real legislation, not showpiece repeals of the ACA or bills you know have no chance of making it to the public, then the electorate can examine what’s in those bills.  That might be quite bad—if they saw what you wanted to do when governing, they might not want you to govern.

But that’s the gamble. The GOP leadership knows that after six years of opposing Mr. Obama on absolutely everything, and after wresting control of the House in 2010, they haven’t show even the desire to do anything constructive. They push the line that the House has passed some bills (which then go to die at the hands of the evil Harry Reid) but in their more self-reflective moments (and they are having one of those now) they fully understand that their accomplishments are meager.  And, they are about to go on recess, with their crowning (and only) achievement being authorizing a lawsuit against Obama for his use of executive action to delay ACA’s employer mandate (which they oppose anyway and were happy to see.)

This is, in fact, the same playbook they have been using since 2011.  The only reason why it’s had some success is that Mr. Obama hasn't been the second coming of George Washington.  It is great for fundraising, appeasing some of their more vituperative media supporters, and driving turnout of the base, but sooner or later people will say, “OK, Obama is terrible.  Now tell me how you would be better?”

Some in the GOP think that question is being asked right now.  Schroeder and Marcos single out two big-ticket items that need prompt legislative attention and are tremendously volatile: the VA system and the under-the-age-but-over-the-border-crisis. 

The VA is a horrible problem. It has been terribly mismanaged for decades, and is the very definition of a bipartisan failure.  And it gets people where they live. You don’t have to be political to understand it’s fundamentally wrong that a soldier could be injured in service, and then mistreated at home. More cynically, if you are political, supporting the vet is a proxy for patriotism.  Or, to put it more crassly, it’s the buzz without the bar-tab.

Answering this imperative, both sides actually tried to do something.  But the gap between the Senate bill and the House bill was huge—they contain vastly different amounts of funding and a different approach to paying for it.  The Senate bill, spearheaded by Vermont Senator (and real Socialist) Bernie Sanders, was proposed as “emergency bill” that was exempt from deficit caps.  The House bill was far smaller and required offsets from other domestic (not military) spending.  This afternoon, a compromise was worked out between Sanders and GOP Congressman Jeff Miller of Florida that makes the Senate bill about half the size ($17B) proposed by the senate, but required only $5B in offsets. And it permits vets who aren’t getting timely care, under certain circumstances, to seek treatment from the private market. It’s not what either side wants (and no one seriously believes that this is going to fix the VA) but hopefully it will be seen as a credible step.  That’s if it passes.  I think it will pass the House, because a previous Democratic resolution to simply adopt the Senate bill picked up 13 Republican votes.  That will lead to one of the most fascinating spectacles of the year—the signing ceremony at the White House. It’s a pretty safe guess that the GOP won't be clamoring for invites or photo-ops.

Still, the VA fix is the politically easier thing, because in the end, it only requires money.  The border situation is far more complex—and it’s particularly complex for Republicans, who have to thread the needle.  Democrats have a fairly coherent (if not entirely popular) policy—we should be welcoming to legal immigration and find a rational way to deal with illegals.  It’s naïve, but it has the virtue of being simple.  Republicans have too many (often angry) stakeholders with different ideas.  There are the secure the border people, and the deport-en-masse people, and the business-Chamber of Commerce wing (who very much want more immigration) and the party professionals who worry about an alienating message being sent.  They can’t all be satisfied. 

That has to have the GOP establishment losing sleep.  Immigration has been on a medium-boil for the last couple of years, but the kids raise the temperature enormously.  There has to be action.  The party leadership knows it.  They just can’t take off five weeks without doing something.  Obama has proposed a $3.7 Billion bill that would provide funding for border security, faster deportations, care, etc. but it has absolutely no chance whatsoever. But it’s something.  Right now, the GOP has nothing except a lot of tough talk.

That is the problem with governing.  It isn’t like a party platform where you can dollop out the red meat to the true believers.  You have to lay it out to everyone and take responsibility for it.  As Barack Obama has learned a thousand times over with Obamacare, you own it, for better or worse.

Is the GOP ready to govern?  Are they ready to own something?

Or, are they just going to call the limo, head for the airport, and ask Putin to lend them some Cossacks?

July 28, 2014

Michael Liss (Moderate Moderator)

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